Well I for one endeavour under the twin tyrants of real life and timezones.
Professional have minutes to evaluate potential threats yes. But unlike those “carping” on a website they have years of experience and ability to tell false from positive very quickly. They don’t operate in a vacuum, they are aware of the world situation and of the enemies dispositions. There are also systems to confirm.An alarm in time of peace is going to be treated with a lot of scepticism, especially when there has been no prior increase in tension or enemy readiness. Also those who evaluate threats and those who order counterstrike are different, it’s not like you have officers looking at scopes with their fingers hovering over the big red button. In real life, all false alarms have been correctly identified as such this includes far more dangerous situations that this one, like the the time aomeone inserted a training simulation tape into NORADs acyive computers leading to the threat board displaying the training exercise as the real thing.
I don’t think a meteor trail would trigger a conflict, but reports of a trail of smoke through the sky followed by a large explosion might lead some to the wrong conclusion. Whether that’s enough to trigger a “retaliatory” strike I’m not sure, but I can imagine a worst case scenario of misinterpretation and false reports leading some sort of panic in a military command centre somewhere. But I would guess it would take a lot of unfortunate mistakes to coincide after such an astroid strike to trigger a missile launch. Yet not an unprecedented number of them.
^ yes – Looking at the videos, I thought it looked like some kind of reentry vehicle. Even absent an immediate retaliatory strike, I could see any populace being whipped up into a frenzy by demagogues and conspiracy, possibly leading to war. That might be true anywhere where there were tensions with a popularly reviled enemy.
I made note of the numbers from the news reports:
17m across (size of a five-storey building)
10,000 tons/tonnes (in hand waving, either unit works)
explosion force 200 times Hiroshima (and that I have heard reported from 12 to 20 kilotons)
Typical rock has a density around 3, iron around 6. A cubic meter of water would weigh 1000kg (1 tonne), of rock - 3 tonnes, iron 5 tonnes. SO yes, a 10-ton meteor would be about 6 ft diameter.
Considering it produced shock waves that knocked out windows for tens of miles around from 12 miles up, and even collapsed a roof in one case - I’m inclined to believe the bigger number.